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		<title>My next term might work out better than current projections predict. &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/11-November/05.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>My next term might work out better than current projections predict.</h1>
			<p>Day 00609: <time>Saturday, 2016 November 05</time></p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/11/05.jpg" alt="The local burnt-out house" class="framed-centred-image" width="811" height="480"/>
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>
		236 scheme-specific <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a>
	</li>
	<li>
		1 free elective left in my associate degree program
	</li>
	<li>
		4 free electives left in my bachelor degree program
	</li>
</ul>
<p>
	Topics for essays that I want to write outside of school:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>
		How the <abbr title="GNU &quot;Free&quot; Documentation License">GFDL</abbr> isn&apos;t a free license, and is effectively nonfree even when invariant sections aren&apos;t used
	</li>
	<li>
		How the telephone number system is screwy
	</li>
	<li>
		How postpaid mobile plans are bad for customers
	</li>
	<li>
		How connections using &quot;untrusted&quot; <abbr title="Transport Layer Security">TLS</abbr> certificates are more trustworthy than connections without any <abbr title="Transport Layer Security">TLS</abbr> certificate at all
	</li>
	<li>
		The importance of free software
	</li>
	<li>
		The importance of free media
	</li>
</ul>
<p>
	I had another strange dream last night.
	This time, I tried to contact my sibling using an ancient, magic, communication pool.
	It was a deep rut in the middle of a hallway.
	Passing through the hallway required jumping over this rut, which was filled with water.
	The pool had some sort of hologram functionality and audio features, and could record incoming messages for later retrieval or could relay messages in real time.
	I tried to reach out to my sibling, who was the one at the communication pool, but they declined the message by telling the pool that they didn&apos;t want to accept the message when it reported that they had an incoming transmission.
	It wasn&apos;t that Vivian didn&apos;t want to talk to me, they just didn&apos;t like using the magic communication pool because they had never taken the time to learn how to use it and didn&apos;t want to bother.
	I decided to reach out via email instead, which they do use, and I opened my message with something to the effect of &quot;since you don&apos;t want to use magical email, I&apos;ll try reaching you with regular email instead&quot;.
	Next, I was headed to the train station to leave our shared school with on-campus housing.
	We passed by a strange tower, which had caught fire, so my friend mentioned something about staying away from it because the flames were dangerous.
	Though we weren&apos;t originally headed to the tower, I explained that the tower always caught fire on certain days, and during that time, you could reach parts of the tower that were normally inaccessible.
	Furthermore, the frequent floods in the tower were also on a schedule, and opened up access to other parts of the tower.
	No one besides me seemed to notice this pattern, but I myself made use of to to reach hidden areas of the tower sometimes.
	We peeked into the tower, which had a doorway but no door, but the stairs were messed up.
	The stairs that would normally lead down, into the ground, now lead up a short way, dropping off.
	The stairs headed up in the other direction were normal, but accessible even without the fire.
	I was confused and unable to demonstrate my point.
	The friend wanted to show me something though, so we headed in another direction.
	They ended up not showing me though, and we split up.
	I tried to make it back to the train station, but I got lost.
	After a while, I remembered that I knew how to teleport short distances, to I simply teleported to the train station.
	It was too late though, I&apos;d missed my train home for the summer.
	I went to talk to the school staff about the situation, and the topic of how lost I&apos;d gotten came up, and when I explained that I had to give up looking for the train station and teleport there, they asked why I didn&apos;t just teleport home.
	I explained that it was too far, so they said to take short leaps through space, making the journey in several hops, but I said again that it was too far.
	Multi-hop or not, it would be exhausting and dangerous.
	When they asked what would happen if I tried, I explained that with the multi-hop method, I&apos;d tire and end up splitting myself at some point, killing myself as I ended up with part of myself having teleported and part of myself staying behind.
	If I tried to make the journey in one hop, I&apos;d end up completely shredding myself across a longer stretch of the journey, with my body matter split between thousands of places in a straight line between my point of departure and my intended definition, to the point where so little of me would be left at each place that what was left of me would be too small to be visible.
	I&apos;d have practically disappeared! One of the staff agreed to help me get home after their several-hour meeting was over, but what I really wanted was for them to activate the portal functionality of the ancient communication device that I&apos;d used earlier, though it was clear that that wasn&apos;t going to happen.
	I&apos;m not sure why I wanted to use the teleportation functionality, but I had an ulterior motive.
	At that point, I wasn&apos;t trying to get home, or anywhere else in particular.
	I ended up wandering off, killing time while I waited for the staff meeting to end, but I ended up in a situation where someone was chasing me.
	I ran on the sides of buildings, I teleported, I phased through solid objects, I flew through the air, but none of it mattered.
	They remained on my tail, intent on catching me.
	I have no idea what would happen if they did, but it scared me too much to allow them to do it.
	In the end, i tried flying straight up in the air, but while they struggled to do the same, they managed to draw closer to me than before.
	 I somehow became aware of the fact that I was dreaming and forced myself to wake up.
</p>
<p>
	After waking up, it looked like there was strange, barley-visible writing filling the top half my wall, but it was too dark to make out.
	By the light of my laptop monitor though, it was of course not actually there.
	After taking note of my strange dream (this journal doubles as a dream journal on the rare occasion that I actually remember dreams), I went back to bed.
</p>
<p>
	I had another strange dream, but the memory slipped away too quickly.
	There was some sort of &quot;sky sea otter ore&quot;; a mystical mineral that had turned an ordinary human being into an inhuman monster that survived by eating other people.
	To eat them, it would open up a diagonal slit in its chest, sucking the people in as they liquefied in its hand.
</p>
<p>
	My program advisor wrote back, again insisting that I take <span title="Principles of Business Management">BUS 1101</span> and only <span title="Principles of Business Management">BUS 1101</span>.
	I am not amused.
	If this is the only term in which this happens, I&apos;ll only be set back one term.
	I will be set back that one term though, as because I&apos;m only taking one course this term, I&apos;ll have another term at the end of my degree program where I&apos;ll have one course left to take.
	Come to think of it, I might even turn this into a good thing by taking a second course on that final term, allowing me to fit in an extra course that I otherwise wouldn&apos;t have been able to take.
	However, if I am repeatedly only able to take one course during various terms, every other time will set me back a term.
	Even worse, if they keep putting me in stupid courses that don&apos;t count toward my degree program, I&apos;ll run out of elective credits and will no longer be making progress toward my degree program at all.
	They could also continue to only offer courses to me that I&apos;ve already taken, which again, means that I can&apos;t make any progress.
</p>
<p>
	Twice now, TotBirdy has disabled itself, allowing Icedove (Thunderbird) to run without it.
	This is concerning.
	What&apos;s the point of TorBirdy if it&apos;s going to keep causing <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr> leaks by shutting off without shutting off the connection with it? Luckily, my proxy settings block all but the <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr> requests from going over the clearnet, but still, something must be done about this.
</p>
<p>
	I did a bit of research for my <code>cap:</code>-scheme <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> class, and it seems that the main thing that had been bothering me about that scheme, its lack of strict compatibility with <abbr title="Request for Comments">RFC</abbr> 3986, was just a misunderstanding.
	When I had arrived at the conclusion that there was a small compatibility issue, I had been too tired to properly process what I was reading, I guess.
	Not only is that scheme&apos;s syntax completely compatible with <abbr title="Request for Comments">RFC</abbr> 3986, <abbr title="Request for Comments">RFC</abbr> even offers a compatibility table for helping <a href="https://tools.ietf.org./html/rfc3986#appendix-D.2">understand old <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> scheme definitions</a>.
	Apparently, it redefines some of the old rules to make them a bit more flexible too, though it also makes some of the old rules less flexible.
	For example, &quot;uric&quot; is redefined to disallow five characters that it formerly allowed: exclamation points, asterisks, apostrophes, and open and close parentheses.
	In this case, it introduces an incompatibility between some old previously-minted <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>s and the specification, but in general, the updated rules might bring some ancient <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> schemes into compliance with the new general <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> specification, which as far as I&apos;m concerned, is a very good thing.
	I completed the <code>cap:</code>-scheme class, then repaired the <code>acap:</code>-scheme class to account for the new syntax definitions.
	Those two appear to be the only schemes that I&apos;ve worked with yet that I needed to go back and fix.
</p>
<p>
	It seems that today&apos;s assignments at work were just meant as a refresher.
	Because I remembered things too well, I ended up getting sent home early.
	It&apos;s kind of ironic; doing better led to less hours and less pay.
	I had forgotten how convenient is to work the drive-through and do dishes.
	We always have to wash our hands between handling money and performing other tasks, but when washing dishes, we&apos;re already headed back to a sink, so there&apos;s no extra point to stop at.
	I also forgot how crusty our hands get when working the lobby register while also flattening dough into pans.
	The dough-flattening process involved coting the dough balls in flower, and due to the constant rush, we almost never have time to make sure our hands are perfectly dry after washing them.
	So we wash our hands after handling money, then go back and handle the flower with slightly-damp hands.
	The one new thing that I did learn was how to work the new drive-through headsets.
	We used to have customers order at the drive-through window when I last worked there, but now, we&apos;ve got the menu board actually functioning.
	The new headsets allow us to speak with customers at the board, then they drive forward, pay, and receive their products as usual.
	It doesn&apos;t seem any more efficient to me, but it does seem a lot more professional.
	I&apos;ve also picked up my schedule for next week.
</p>
<p>
	University of <span class="redacted">[REDACTED]</span> wrote to me, though they weren&apos;t writing back about the course registration issue.
	However, it looks like it might get solved.
	Students here are required to pass their first term&apos;s courses before being officially admitted as a degree-seeking student.
	With an A+ and an A-, I have done that.
	Now, it looks like by the end of the week, they plan to choose two courses for me that will count toward my degree and enroll me in them.
	I fear that they&apos;ll leave me enrolled in this stupid <span title="Principles of Business Management">BUS 1101</span> course because I&apos;m already in it, then enroll me in only one useful course, but it&apos;d be better than the position that I&apos;m in now.
	Another option would be that they leave me enrolled in <span title="Principles of Business Management">BUS 1101</span>, but register me in two courses like they said that they would.
	This option seems unlikely, but if I can keep up with the course load, would leave me with more credits at the end of next term.
	I think that the solution that I&apos;m hoping for though is that they&apos;ll unregister me from <span title="Principles of Business Management">BUS 1101</span> and enroll me in two actually-needed courses.
	I feel like I <strong>*should*</strong> want to take three courses at once to make more progress, but I honestly don&apos;t know if I could handle the work load of three courses, a part-time job, and working on sorting things so that we can get moved.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
<section id="docmod">
	<h2>Document modifications</h2>
	<p>
		On <a href="/en/weblog/2017/11-November/02.xhtml">2017-11-02</a>, this journal page was modified in order to redact the name of the university.
	</p>
	<p>
		On <a href="/en/weblog/2018/01-January/16.xhtml#Vivian">2018-01-16</a>, my sister, Vivian, requested that I replace all instances of her legal name in my journal with the name &quot;Vivian&quot;.
		She also asked that the name of the organisation she works for be redacted.
		This page was modified to fulfil that request.
	</p>
</section>
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			If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
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